Markets and Companies are neither created nor destroyed. They just transform from one form to the another.

I’ll give you some examples. Amazon.com when it started in 95 was a very ambitious project. A few years later, they were raking in 30million dollars as revenues. But where did that money come from? Very few people think about it, but customers are a finite set. God isn’t growing customers on trees yet. So essentially what happens is that since the need hasn’t exemplified, just found a better solution, people switch from one service to another. The year that Amazon.com announced its $30mn revenue stream, the music and bookstore industry had lost close to 2billion dollars. Disruptive? Yep, if you are a startup and on the growth curve, very much so. Scary? Absolutely. Especially if you are three days old and even have a handful of customers.

I think this is a very basic understand that we need to have. Markets are not created. All this talk on Markets, and blah is just a segmentation process that economists and entrepreneurs have to work with to figure out how to shape their product. The truth is that there are consumers and consumers or clients are essentially people. And People are finite. if you work backwards, then so are markets.Read the rest of this entry »

1. I’m hearing reports that a social networking site, one of the investments of Sequoia and ,the SN offering of reliance (Note: Update below) are both finding it hard to scale up and might face the inevitable very soon.

Is it true? if it is, then does this mark the fact that Social networking is a big No-no in India and whatever mass we had that was buying into that story have already sold their souls to orkut and facebook? How many users does Fropper have?

2. How are sites like techtribe doing?

3. Do you realize that the largest possible userbase is possibly the job sites like Naukri.com, and matrimonial sites like BharatMatrimony and Shaadi.com?

4. Given that in India, we have a fixed number of users who are perenially online, and do have the mindset and the bandwidth to “socially network”, wouldnt it be better to perhaps create an OpenID system, perhaps like the one that yahoo has created (openid.yahoo.com) to login into all of these sites, which would possibly also benefit all of these sites? Or is that something OpenSocial has to solve?

Do pitch in your thoughts.

Update:

It does seem that the Rs.100 crore that has gone into Bigadda and the marketing that it is undergoing, is essentially driving a lot of traffic. A quick alexa search with comparison to the other contenders show some pretty interesting trends.

Bits and pennies, (Thanks Sabah Kazi) has an interesting graph that shows the trend (using alexa)

So its quite apparent that there is a quite a bit of traffic being driven towards the site – actually some tens of millions.

I’d like to see a analysis on the conversion rates that are going on, the total traffic, the new user sign ups, and the breakup of active versus passive users.

One thing is clear, with the sheer amount of money pumping in, Bigadda.com might stick around for a while.